How to Schedule an iPhoto Slideshow to Play Automatically

Power Manager can be used to start an iPhoto slideshow playing automatically. You can create an event that will wake up your Mac, launch iPhoto, and start your slideshow at a specific time or on certain days of the week. Let's walk through how to create an event to launch iPhoto and to start playing a slideshow.

Power Manager can be used to start an iPhoto slideshow playing automatically. You can create an event that will wake up your Mac, launch iPhoto, and start your slideshow at a specific time or on certain days of the week.

Apple’s iPhoto for Mac OS X

Let’s walk through how to create an event to launch iPhoto and to start playing a slideshow.

The event will use a short AppleScript to interact with iPhoto, and Power Manager will deal with waking the Mac and running the AppleScript at the right time.

Create a Scheduled iPhoto Slideshow Event

  1. Launch System Preferences and select Power Manager.

  2. Click Add… to create a new event.

    Click add to create a new Power Manager event.

  3. Choose the template Run a script daily.

    Select the Run a script daily task.

  4. Click Continue to the Script step.

  5. Copy and paste the following AppleScript into Script to run:

    #!/usr/bin/osascript
    
    tell application "iPhoto"
    	activate
    	start slideshow using album "Queens Wood, Dinmore"
    end tell
    

    You will need to change the name of the album to play. In this example, the album is called Queens Wood, Dinmore.

    Copy and paste the AppleScript into Script to run.

  6. Click Continue to the When step.

  7. Adjust the time and days to read 09:45, with every day of the week selected.

    Adjust the time and days to play the iPhoto slideshow.

  8. Continue through the remaining steps until your event is created.

    Continue passed the Power Manager Constraints steps.

    Complete the Why step.

    Confirm the creation of the iPhoto event.

With these steps completed, Power Manager has created a single event. This event will launch iPhoto at 09:45 every day and start the slideshow. The event will also wake up the Mac, if it is sleeping.

The iPhoto event is created and scheduled.

This event has on-demand behaviour. This behaviour means it can be triggered immediately using the Power Manager status menu and through Power Manager Remote.

The iPhoto slideshow can be triggered on-demand.